C++ Meetup, Christmas Edition

Hi everyone,

We are excited to announce our Christmas Meetup, on the 12th December from 6pm. We have two great speakers lined up:

Talk 1: Dave Gittins, "The Missing Link II: The curious symbiosis between C++ and the dynamic linker"

Bio: Dave is an experienced programmer and recovering astrophysicist who has worked with Fortran, MATLAB, Python, Java and C++. After many years as a space & defence consultant in the UK, he moved to Sydney to work in algorithmic trading. He first dabbled in C++ somewhere in the early 90s when Turbo C++ still existed. Since joining IMC five years ago, he's enjoyed working in teams that push the modern C++ language to its limits and learning what can be done with it.​

Synopsis: This is the promised follow-up to 2017's Part I: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=twNoIhGKIoo

I plan to continue where I left off, so I recommend watching this one before the night!

In this talk I'll continue the theme of how the C++ standard includes strict rules about the "entire program", but they rely on what the linker does and ​how it is driven by the build structure. I will again give live examples based on very simple code involving shared libraries and look at what the dynamic linking / loading does, how it maps onto the C++ standard (if it does at all), and some differences between platforms that start to affect our C++ lives.

Talk 2: Alex Radchenko, "Keep it C-mple"

Bio: Alex Radchenko joined Microsoft as a Senior Software Engineer at the beginning of 2019.

At Microsoft he's working on Azure Ultra Disk which is the next generation low latency, high throuhgput distributed block storage system. As his day-to-day job he does kernel hacking and data analysis to drive the optimisation effort across the entire storage stack.

Prior to joining Microsoft, he was writing and optimising low latency trading systems at Optiver for 3 years.

Before Optiver, he was developing video games for 15 years on all major platforms. He has multiple shipped games under his belt, including massive online shooter World of Tanks. Alex specialises in systems programming and likes to share his knowledge.

See his previous talk at Meeting C++ conference: https://isocpp.org/blog/2019/01/benchmarking-cpp-from-video-games-to-algorithmic-trading-alexander-radchenk

Nothing is better than converting a big, sluggish piece of software into a lean, fast machine.

Synopsis: This talk is about avoiding unnecessary complexity in software. "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler" (c)

I'll share my reflections on moving from Modern C++ to C ( Windows Kernel ). We will look how similar results could be achieved in both environments and see pros and cons of each approach.

Topics to be covered :

• Reading / searching / writing code
• Testing
• Flow control
• Data structures

IMC will be the major sponsor at this event, big thanks to them for hosting their space on George Street.